Pink Floyd have raised the tantalising prospect of finally playing Glastonbury, or at least two-thirds of the surviving members have.

Wish you were here: V&A announces details of Pink Floyd exhibition

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Roger Waters and Nick Mason made a rare appearance together on Thursday and said they would be up for playing Glastonbury, presumably music to the ears of the festival’s founder, Michael Eavis, who last year said his wishlist included Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac.

The problem will be David Gilmour: his former bandmates gave the impression of only being vaguely aware of his movements.

“The last I heard, David retired,” said Waters to Mason. “You know David better than me.”

Mason replied: “I heard he’d retired and then he seemed to unretire, so we don’t know.” He added that he had never played at Glastonbury and it would be fun “but I don’t think it is very likely but yes I would do it given the opportunity”.

Waters has played the festival and remembered it being “really cold. There were a lot of people and it seemed very jolly and I liked it”.

In truth, the prospect of a full reunion seems remote with Gilmour and Waters having had a particularly strained relationship over the years. They appeared as a foursome with the late Rick Wright for four songs at Live 8 in 2005 and Gilmour and Mason joined Waters at an O2 concert in 2011.

Waters said the subject of why don’t Pink Floyd get back together “is so dull … isn’t it?”

The exhibition will feature a laser light show and previously unseen concert footage as well as more than 350 objects and artefacts including instruments, handwritten lyrics, posters, architectural drawings and psychedelic prints.

Waters said he was particularly pleased to hear about a recent addition to the show: the cane used on him when he was a boy at Cambridge and County high school for boys.

“I’m inordinately proud, I don’t know why,” he said of his six strokes for fighting in 1959. “It is so archaic now, the idea of hitting people with sticks. It’s normally now confined to the foreign policy of major western powers.”

He said he remembered the cane being a flimsy thing used by a headteacher whose heart was not fully in it. Pink Floyd’s creative director Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell said the cane and the school’s punishment book were recently discovered by his colleague Paula Webb Stainton. “There are artefacts in this exhibition that have very, very deep emotional and contextual references to the work of Pink Floyd,” he said.

It was Waters’ school experiences that directly influenced The Wall album, with the anti-education song Another Brick in the Wall (We don’t need no education/ We don’t need no thought control/ No dark sarcasm in the classroom/ Teachers leave those kids alone). Also important was the artwork by Gerald Scarfe, which included a grotesque cane-wielding school teacher. Waters commemorated the fall of the Berlin wall in 1990 with a performance of The Wall.

On Thursday he was asked whether he would consider performing The Wall post-Trump, on the Mexico and US border. “I’ve always said I’d do it again if they ever figure out what to do about Israel and Palestine and get rid of that appalling security barrier,” he replied.

“If there was a resolution and we could realise there is no ‘us and them’ and that we’re all human beings and we all need to figure out how to live together because at the moment … as an act of celebration, if that moved towards a humane way of organising ourselves, I would be only too happy to perform that concert in some place that was significant geographically.

“If that happened to be the border between the United States and Mexico then yeah absolutely.”

• The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains is at the V&A 13 May – 1 October.